A few of my favorite things

Here are some of my favorite items from my shop:

Making beaded earrings

I thought I'd share what it looks like when I'm making beaded earrings (the ones available in my shop here):

See all of our other earrings and products at the store: Sage & Savvy Soap Co.

Preparing a batch of soap

I thought I'd show you how Sage & Savvy Soap Co. prepared our Wild Raspberry Bar Soap:

First, Lindsey made the soap and poured it in the mold, where it processed and hardened for 24 hours:

After she unmolded and cut it, she let the individual bars dry for a few more hours:

Then, Lindsey got out the soap stamp:

After wrapping and tying labels on all of the soaps, we had the final product!

Purchase Here

We also made matching lip balm:

Purchase Here

See all of our other soaps and products at the store: Sage & Savvy Soap Co.

Playing the Piano

I have taken a somewhat unplanned hiatus from this blog to focus on school for the past year, but I recently began to get involved with fixing up my home and doing craft projects again. Today I want to share my piano with you. I have a Williams Allegro electric keyboard. It is full-sized and has the same hammer/push feel as regular piano keys. Over the past year, it has spent most of its time holding my mail, but I cleaned and dusted it off last week and got some new equipment for it from Amazon.

The sustain pedal that came with it is crap. It was small and plastic and would slide all over the carpet when I tried to use it, assuming it would even work to begin with. I had no idea until a few days ago that I could buy a new sustain pedal instead of wrestling with the old one, it just didn't occur to me. So I found a new one. I got an M-Audio SP-2, which is a heavyweight pedal that operates just like a standard pedal on a normal piano:

I also purchased a pair of Behringer headphones intended for studio use (I never play the piano without headphones, I often play late at night before I go to bed) and a dust cover. So here is my beautiful piano and all its accessories (all of my music is in the black binders to the left):

My only complaint is that the x-bar of the keyboard stand gets in the way sometimes when I'm using the pedal, but overall, it works so I can't complain. The padded stool is pretty comfortable, but I'm looking forward to upgrading it to a real piano bench sometime.

I have been playing the piano for a long time--since I was 8 years old, and I have always played on regular pianos, so it was an adjustment when I first started playing on my digital one, but it's the only one I really can have with my frequent moving over the past few years. Now though, with my new sustain pedal and headphones, I literally don't notice any difference between my piano and a regular one. And I didn't have to pay big bucks to tune it first.